No Silver Bullet

Every Thursday, my friend Dora comes over for lunch and accountability. We catch up on life, talk about what God is teaching us, and confess our sins to one another. Our pastors are preaching through the book of Galatians this fall, and Dora and I find ourselves coming back to the sermon on Galatians 5:16-26 over and over. We both have areas of sin that Paul addresses in his list of “works of the flesh” that we want to eliminate from our lives, and we both struggle to believe we’ll ever move from flesh to fruit. We’ve circled this passage for weeks in our discussions, and yesterday I expressed my exasperation with my weaknesses. I feel like there’s a bridge between Galatians 5:21 and 5:22 that I can’t find.

 “…I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do [works of the flesh] will not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with is passion and desires” (Gal. 5:21b-24).

I don’t know how to make the leap from my works of the flesh—the quick spark of anger, the idol of selfish ambitions, the slow burn of envy—to love, gentleness, kindness, self-control. What I want, to be honest, is a silver bullet. An immediate change. An instantaneous sanctification. But I know that isn’t how the Christian life goes. Though the Lord may save us in a moment, He takes a lifetime to sanctify us.

After we finished lunch and Dora went back to work, I sat with my Bible open to Galatians 5 and read the passage several times. Frustrated, I prayed for help. In the Lord’s kindness, I stumbled upon a sermon by John Piper that he preached at his home church in 1983.

Piper explains Paul’s descriptions of the flesh versus walking by the Spirit, dismantling any attempt to chalk up the fruit of the Spirit to moralism. No good deeds will accomplish this transfer. Rather, there is a connection between denying the flesh and being led by the Spirit. On the one hand, our flesh has been crucified. On the other hand, crucifixion takes a long time to kill you. We have to make sure that the corpse is really dead. At the end of Piper’s sermon, he uses an illustration to help us understand what Paul means by verse 24 when he says, “And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.” This illustration is lengthy, but I promise it is worth your time to read.

Picture your flesh—that old ego with the mentality of merit and craving for power and reputation and self-reliance—picture it as a dragon living in some cave of your soul. Then you hear the gospel, and in it Jesus Christ comes to you and says, “I will make you mine and take possession of the cave and slay the dragon. Will you yield to my possession? It will mean a whole new way of thinking and feeling and acting.” You say: “But that dragon is me. I will die.” He says, “And you will rise to newness of life, for I will take its plan; I will make my mind and my will and my heart your own.” You say, “What must I do?” He answers, “Trust me and do as I say. As long as you trust me, we cannot lose.” Overcome by the beauty and power of Christ you bow and swear eternal loyalty and trust.

And as you rise, he puts a great sword in your hand and says, “Follow me.” He leads you to the mouth of the cave and says, “Go in, slay the dragon.” But you look at him bewildered, “I cannot. Not without you.” He smiles. “Well said. You learn quickly. Never forget: my commands for you to do something are never commands to do it alone.” Then you enter the cave together. A horrible battle follows and you feel Christ’s hand on yours. At last the dragon lies limp. You ask, “Is it dead?” His answer is this: “I have come to give you new life. This you received when you yielded to my possession and swore faith and loyalty to me. And now with my sword and my hand you have felled the dragon of the flesh. It is a mortal wound. It will die. That is certain. But it has not yet bled to death, and it may yet revive with violent convulsions and do much harm. So you must treat it as dead and seal the cave as a tomb. The Lord of darkness may cause earthquakes in your soul to shake the stones loose, but you build them up again. And have this confidence: with my sword and my hand on yours this dragon’s doom is sure, he is finished, and your new life is secure.”[1]

I feel helpless to kill my sin all the way dead. I keep looking for that silver bullet, that one quick arrow to the heart of my flesh, but really, this is a long process—a long slaying, a regular stacking of the stones to keep that tomb sealed shut, a regular reckoning of my flesh as dead. Though the enemy works hard against us, the Spirit helps us to restack the stones, to block the exits, to remember that the corpse is dead.

But why does it take so long? Why do some sins die quickly and others hang on like they’ve got a defibrillator attached to them at all times? The seeming foreverness of my struggle discourages me. If the Lord wanted me to have victory, wouldn’t He just remove my weakness altogether?

Last night, after my kids were in bed, I picked up Becket Cook’s book, A Change of Affection, and settled in for an evening of reading under a warm blanket on the couch. I came to this encouragement and had to reread it several times. Though he is speaking of sexual sin, it could apply to whatever sin came to your mind immediately when you began reading this post.

“God created the universe; he can heal sexual brokenness in an instant. But sometimes he allows various struggles to persist, because we are being sanctified. These struggles force us to press into him more and more and depend on his grace to get us ‘from one degree of glory to another’ (2 Cor. 3:18), ultimately conforming us more and more into the image of Christ.”[2]

He goes on to mention Paul’s thorn in 2 Corinthians 12, and as the familiar words of the apostle rushed to mind, things began to click into place. Sanctification is a long, slow process. If it was instantaneous, how hard would we have to lean on Christ? Would we keep coming to Him every morning with desperation and neediness? Would we continue to search His words for truth and hope? Would we recognize that it is His presence in our lives that slowly sloughs off the rough edges of sinfulness? Would a quick, silver bullet sanctification keep us firmly near His side?

If He doesn’t completely remove our fight with a particular sin, we can know that He will not waste our struggle. He will use it to keep us aware of how indispensable His grace is, of how we need Him every hour, every minute, every second.

When the spark of anger in my heart threatens to combust into a blaze, I must stop and deny the dragon her breath. She is dead. I must cry out to the Spirit to help me block the exits, restack the stones, remember that I am new and that I belong to Christ. The death of my flesh is sure because it was Christ’s hand on the sword that killed her. Though it is a life’s work to reckon the dragon dead, we will do it together. The cumulative effect of daily dependence on the Word, the Spirit, prayer, and confession with fellow believers—this is how we restack the stones and reckon the flesh dead. There is a no silver bullet here. But God is glorified in our bit-by-bit, degree-by-degree, day-by-day sanctification.

One day, we’ll be altogether done with sin, and what a day that will be.

 

 

I must cry out to the Spirit to help me block the exits, restack the stones, remember that I am new and that I belong to Christ. The death of my flesh is sure because it was Christ’s hand on the sword that killed her. Share on X

 

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[1] John Piper. “Walk By the Spirit!” Desiring God website, August 7, 1983. https://www.desiringgod.org/messages/walk-by-the-spirit

[2] Becket Cook, A Change of Affection: A Gay Man’s Incredible Story of Redemption (Nashville, TN: Nelson Books, 2019), 125.

Photo by Ian Chen on Unsplash